If you’re going to pretend a document is from 2006, you should use Times New Roman.

I was confused for a few moments today, after one of my colleagues asked me if I'd heard about "fontgate."

"Fontgate?" I queried.

"Pakistan either loves or hates Calibri," I was unhelpfully informed.

Apparently, there were some forged documents, and the forgery was detected by the use of Microsoft's Calibri. But I was confused; this sounded like a story from years ago. Why was it in the news now?

On further reading, one thing became clear about Calibri's popularity in Pakistan: while opponents of the government may indeed be fans, the Sharif don't like it.

Rock the Candara

The Panama Papers—a collection of documents leaked from off-shore law firm Mossack Fonseca in 2014—included documents that appeared to indicate that Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had accumulated a substantial fortune far beyond what he and his family legitimately earned. The Pakistani Supreme Court set up a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) to determine where the money came from. Sharif produced documents to show that the money had been legitimately acquired, but the authenticity of those documents was in question. Daughter Maryam Sharif appeared to have signed forged documents to try to cover up the truth.

How was the forgery detected? A document purporting to have been written and signed in 2006 used Microsoft's Calibri font. While Calibri was originally designed in 2004 and was available in betas of Windows Vista and Office 2007 throughout 2006, it didn't actually ship in a stable version of Windows or Office until 2007. As such, its use in a document dated 2006 is extremely suspect. It's not impossible that, for some reason, beta software was used to prepare the documents. But it is more than a little unlikely.

Ultimately, the fallout of the corruption and cover-up is that Pakistan may soon, like Calibri itself, be sans-Sharif.

After many years of uglifying the world with the dual atrocities of Times New Roman, the default font in Word, and Arial, the default in Excel and PowerPoint, Microsoft's 2007 releases included a range of attractive new fonts with "C" names: Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, and, my personal favorite, Corbel. Calibri was chosen as the new default font in Word. Absent other cues, the use of Calibri is, therefore, an instant indicator that a document was produced some time after the release of Office 2007.

When in (Times New) Rome

This is a foolish error to make by the forgers. But what makes it even more foolish is that I wasn't mistaken; this did indeed sound like a story from years ago. In 2012, the Islamist Turkish government accused more than 300 people of plotting a coup to overthrow it. The accusations were made on the basis of documents dated as far back as 2003—documents that referenced, and sometimes even used, Calibri and the other C-family fonts, and hence they couldn't have been produced in 2003. The court ignored the temporal impossibility of the documents and found the defendants guilty anyway.

Other Word features have caught out forgers, too. The "Killian documents," which claimed President George W. Bush was declared unfit for service during his time with the Air National Guard, purported to have been produced on a typewriter in 1973. However, those documents used proportional fonts and curly quotes, making it spectacularly unlikely that they were authentic. Standard 1973 vintage typewriters didn't offer either proportional fonts or curly quotes, but 2004-vintage Microsoft Word did both.

In spite of this obvious typographic anachronism, CBS and journalist Dan Rather presented the documents as authentic on an episode of 60 Minutes II. The scandal surrounding this use of such flawed evidence saw the show cancelled in 2005 while numerous CBS personnel were fired or asked to resign. Rather retired that same year.

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